TURKEY: Fantastic Crisis

"It would be nice if Turkey were a republic"—thus wistfully thinks President Mustafa Kemal Pasha.

Does anyone doubt this? Curious goings on at Angora last week proved it again up to the Turkish scimitar's hilt. At no end of trouble and no small risk to himself Dictator Kemal, the apostle of "Europeanization" who made Turks take off the fez and put on the hat, provided his beloved country last week with what every real European republic has: a multi-party system, and its result, a crisis.

There has been no "crisis," no ousting of the Prime Minister by hostile Turkish Parliamentary votes, for many a year; because there has been only one Parliamentary party — Kemal's. Leading citizens who might have opposed the Dictator were cleaned out in one big batch four years ago (TIME, Sept. 6, 1926). hung from peculiar Turkish tripod-gibbets by the neck until dead. This was done on the theory that the executed were "Enemies of the Revolution"— much as batches of counter-revolutionaries are being shot today in Russia (see p. 20). In Turkey as in Russia the one-party system seems to have worked well (from the standpoint of stability of the regime) but abruptly two months ago Dictator Kemal, a man of lightning-flash ideas which terrify his friends, decided that Turkey must have at least two parties, resolved to create an Opposition to himself.

Who should lead the new Opposition party? His Excellency Ali Fethi Bey. appointed by Kemal Turkish Ambassador at Paris, was recalled. With dazzling celerity a by-election was arranged last week at Smyrna to elect Fethi to Parliament. By order of Prime Minister Ismet Pasha, who was going to be ousted by the coming "crisis." Smyrna police used whips on the rabble to make them turn out at the polls. They could vote, the police told them, either for an obscure and locally unpopular candidate offered by Dictator Kemal's own "Peoples' Republican Party" or for the eminent and honored Fethi Bey, founder-candidate of the new "Liberal Republican Party." When some of the rabble began to howl "Bread, bread!", protesting that in their misery they did not want to vote, police lashes curled, cracked. His Excellency Fethi Bey was triumphally elected. Next day 15 Kemalist Deputies deserted the President's party as ostentatiously as possible, announced that after communing with their consciences they had become ''Liberal Republicans" instead of "Peoples' Republicans."

At this point, with the Opposition created, all seemed ripe for the crisis, but canny Fethi Bey decided to play super-safe. Not wishing to wake up some morning on a gibbet by mistake, the Leader of the Opposition harangued Parliament, proposed that the Deputies elect Mustafa Kemal Pasha—"our Glorious Ghazi, our Victorious One"—to be president of Turkey for life. (His second four-year term expires in 1931).

Replied the Victorious One, mystic, wistful: "The proposal to make me President of the Turkish Republic for life runs utterly counter to my ideal. The precedent of a lifetime presidency must never be established! The complete sovereignty of the people is inherent and must always prevail in republican regimes."